In English common law, real property, real estate, realty, or immovable property is any subset of land that has been legally defined and the improvements to it made by human efforts: any buildings, machinery, wells, dams, ponds, mines, canals, roads, etc. Real property and personal property are the two main subunits of property in English Common Law.
In countries with personal ownership of real property, civil law protects the status of real property in real-estate markets, where licensed agents, realtors, work in the market of buying and selling real estate. Scottish civil law calls real property “heritable property”, and in French-based law, it is called immobilier.